Bandwagon

I cannot claim to be a Saints fan.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, an NFL franchise in Birmingham, where I grew up, so I was free to pick a team. I never cottoned to the Atlanta Falcons, so that left the Miami Dolphins and New Orleans Saints in the South (and I guess the Bucs, but that was just too much to ask). The first year I was really aware of the NFL was 1982, and the Dolphins went to the Super Bowl. A year later, a fellow named Dan Marino came on the scene, and that was that.

I was only dimly aware of the Saints; they were so bad I don't think they were ever on television that much. That was about the time they featured Ken Stabler, Earl Campbell, and coach Bud Phillips, but they were limping out of the league then, and the Saints were little better for their presence.

Birmingham did have a pro team, though, at least for a few years: the Stallions of the USFL. Once that league folded, the best players invaded the NFL, and I rooted for a lot of those guys--even quarterback Bobby Hebert and head coach Jim Mora, who had both spent three years beating up on my Stallions. Now they were both on the Saints, and suddenly the Saints were good.

This was just a few years before my dad succumbed to depression and then dementia. I was in high school, and watching football was one of the few things left that we did together. For some reason, he was fascinated by Hebert. "Look at that
Hebert," he would say. Hebert was good, but I don't know why my dad liked him so much. I think mainly he liked saying his name.

I still rooted for the Saints after Mora ("Playoffs? Playoffs?!?!") and Hebert moved on. And after getting a BA and MA at Auburn, I attended the MFA program at one of Auburn's arch enemies, LSU. I'd been to Louisiana a number of times before. My uncle and his family had lived there for several years around the time I was born. I was told that I slept through a Mardi Gras parade when I was less than a year old. My cousin was fond of saying about the Saints that "John Gilliam returned the opening kickoff in their very first game for a touchdown, and they haven't done anything since."

The family went to New Orleans a couple of times when I was a kid. All I remembered were the pictures outside the tittie bars and the old architecture. New Orleans isn't much of a town for visiting kids. I didn't realize what fun could be had in New Orleans until I was at LSU. I regret not making the trip more than I did, but when I did go I had great fun. And I came to realize that New Orleans was as passionate about the Saints as LSU or Auburn fans were about their team.

It was at LSU, probably while making the drive to New Orleans or back and forth from Birmingham, that I discovered the Buddy "Buddy D" Dilberto radio show. The Saints were terrible at the time, which always makes for better sports radio, and Buddy was leading the charge for the hiring of Mike Ditka. Ditka didn't work out so well, which continued to make for fun listening. I still vividly remember one caller, in absolute agony after another Saints debacle:

"I don't know what to do, Buddy, I don't know what to do," the fan said.

"There's not much you can do," Buddy said, "except go into the bathroom, lift up the lid, and throw up."

My wife and I moved to Kentucky after finishing at LSU, and it wasn't until we moved to Chicago that I found sports radio just as amusing as Buddy D's show. Every once in a while I could somehow pick up AM 870 (I think that was the channel) to get another taste of Buddy, and I was saddened to hear of his death in 2005.

I still have friends in New Orleans, friends I worried about when Katrina hit in 2005. They didn't suffer like some people, perhaps, but they had their share of trouble, and they had stories. And like the rest of the country, like anyone who had any connection to that town and that state, I watched it all unfold, shocked, horrified, and depressed. I haven't been back since it happened, something I intend to correct soon.

I can't buy into the hype that a sports team can cure what ails a city or region. But because I grew up in Alabama, and went to Auburn and LSU, and listened to Buddy D's show, and lived in Chicago, I do know that, absurd though it may be, a sports team can provide an exuberant, irrational joy that makes you forget your troubles for just a moment. "Rock 'n' roll won't solve your problems," Pete Townshend once said (fittingly, playing at the Super Bowl halftime this Sunday). "But it will let you sort of dance all over them." The same could be said for sports.

There have been times when I rooted against the Saints. For a few years they beat up on my newly adopted team, the Rams (my wife is from St. Louis). And though I was a bit torn, I rooted for the Bears a few years ago when they and the Saints both met in the NFC Championship. I lived in Chicago for four years, never in New Orleans.

Who did the Bears lose to in the Super Bowl that year? Why, the Indianapolis Colts. Never one of my favorite teams, going back to my days as a passionate Dolphins fan. And while Peyton Manning seems to be a good guy, I've been sick of him since he was at Tennessee, lining up against Auburn and LSU.

So who will I be rooting for this Sunday?

I cannot claim to be a Saints fan.

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Does digital size matter?

I share my buddy Steve Weddle's skepticism about whether eReaders are going to save publishing.

Sure, they might kill the used book market and temporarily increase sales. Maybe those Kindle and Nook and iPad buyers will keep buying books at higher than normal rate for a few years until they realize they're never going to get around to reading those 30 books they bought back when their toy was shiny and new.

But are eReaders going to create new audiences? Are people really going to read books on a screen when they wouldn't read on that icky, yucky paper stuff?

Not a chance.

I do think, though, that eReaders may impact the length of creative works.

The guideline of 80-110,000 words (or thereabouts) for a first novel is tied to the economics of book printing rather a scientifically derived formula for how long readers will put up with a story. Giant tomes like Infinite Jest or slim volumes like Bridges of Madison County were rarities because printing costs being what they were, they made no business sense. Remove book printing from the equation, you remove most restraints on length--other than the demands of the story.

The same thing happened to the music album upon the advent of the compact disc. To that point, albums were around 40 minutes long, and not because God had decreed it be so, but because that was all you could fit on an LP. Double and even triple albums (Sandinista!) existed, but were rarities.

Length restrictions were not all bad, by any means. The LP forced a measure of discipline, and if you have novel-bloat along the lines of album-bloat, quality may suffer. The Rising would have been a lot better at Born to Run length. But works needn't be longer. Perhaps we'll see something of a renaissance for the short story, for it too will be freed from its periodical fetters. "Short story length" and "novel length" may become quaint terms.

That's not to say that length will no longer matter. A 200,000-word novel still requires a greater investment of time from a publisher than a 90,000 one. And though "The Swimmer" might be an infinitely more rewarding read than say, anything by Dan Brown, few people will pay more for it.

As brick-and-mortar bookstores, both used and new, disappear and readership shrinks, fiction may become even more experimental, both in terms of form and subject matter. Comic books certainly got more interesting when they became an obscure hobby, available only in specialty shops where the casual reader would never tread. Of course, comic books may disappear once their remaining audience of thirty- and fortysomething white men get old and die. But that's another story.

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The Big Secret (about the Massachusetts Election, and Everything Else)

My good friend Will Collier is giddy about Scott "This is My Truck" Brown's win in Massachusetts, and with good reason. A Republican takeover of Ted Kennedy's seat is no small feat.

No doubt Will and others will analyze the election to death. Many will argue that it's a refutation of Obama and liberalism. Of course, it was only a year ago that Obama's victory was supposedly a refutation of Bush and conservatism. And four years before that Karl Rove was rubbing his big fat belly and contemplating a "permanent Republican majority." So either there's a lot of refutation going on, and everything's speeding up, and the refutations are going to become weekly, and then daily, until everything starts spinning around and around really fast until we disappear into a black hole, or something else is going on.

I think I know what that something is. It ain't a big secret. The Big Secret of politics is that there's no secret. The better candidate usually wins--especially in an open seat.

I'm not saying the better guy (or woman) wins. I'm not saying the better Congressman, or senator, or president wins. I'm saying the better candidate wins.

These days candidates just don't get swept into power on waves of ideology. The spinmeisters will tell you different, but that's their job, and they want to remain employed. You can make the case for 1980, but I'd say there hasn't been a true ideological shift in this country since LBJ and Tricky Dick got the guns-and-Whitey-God crowd in the south to switch parties back in the sixties. Since then, the politics have been mostly for show as members of both parties rant and rave and then, once in office, dutifully obey their corporate overlords.

So how do you be a better candidate? Usually, you have to be reasonably good looking. Bemoan this all you want, cite LBJ and that Traficant guy, but if all other things are equal, comeliness is the tiebreaker (unless you're even stupider than you are good looking--more on this later). Second, you have to stay on message. Your message must be simple, and you must repeat it over and over, no matter how dumb. Third, come up with some kind of cornpone, man-of-the-people prop, but don't overdo it. Brown had it right with his truck. If he'd gone overboard and walked around in a ridiculous plaid shirt like Lamar Alexander, he would have lost. Fourth, you must have good organization--good fundraising, good GOTV effort. When someone calls and says she wants a sign in her yard, you take her the fucking sign.

Lastly, it really really helps if the other candidate is an idiot and fails on one or more of the above. Coakley was an idiot. Not particularly well-liked to begin with; a friend of mine who grew up in Boston said he didn't know much about her, but never liked her much. But then she topped it off with the Curt Schilling thing. I'm from Alabama, not Massachusetts, but I know if you were running for office down there and said Joe Namath went to Tennessee, or Bo Jackson went to Georgia, you'd be toast. It takes a really special kind of idiot to lose Ted Kennedy's seat, and she, along with her state and national party cohorts, qualified in spades.

Still don't believe me about just being the better candidate? Let's review. My political memory goes back only to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was the better candidate. Sure, plenty of people derided him, were terrified of him. But he was a movie star, and Mr. Carter was, well, a dullard. Whatever else you might think about him, good or bad, you can't say he was Mr. Excitement. The better candidate won.

Though neither option in 1988 was much to write home about, Bush 41 was the better candidate. Dukakis never really found his voice, and he should have never gotten in that tank. Bush had the "read my lips" lie, the Willie Horton ad, and he hung out in flag factories for most of the campaign.

In 1992, Bush looked at his watch. Clinton played the saxophone and Fleetwood Mac. Looking back on it now, his philandering probably helped at least as much as hurt by providing a bit of color. Gennifer Flowers wasn't exactly Marilyn Monroe, but she wasn't Monica Lewinsky, which would have been a killer.

In 1996 Dole was the "Get outta my yard" candidate, a theme the Republicans would revisit in 2008.

The soon-to-be Bush 43 was the better candidate in 2000. Maybe Gore was smarter, maybe he would have governed reasonably well as a robotic technocrat, but while he was busy changing wardrobes, Bush was repeating "compassionate conservative" and "I'm a uniter, not a divider" over and over. Was it true? No, it was horseshit. But he campaigned better, and (more or less) won.

Now 2004 was a real race to the bottom. We thought the Democrats couldn't lose that one even if they tried, but they tried, and they succeeded! They nominated John Kerry, who almost won anyway, but ended up windsurfing his way back to the Senate.

In 2008, Obama had it all over Grampy. Despite what some others may say, I don't think Americans are so enamored of the Black Man that they're champing at the bit to vote for him, even if he's light-skinned and doesn't speak in a Negro dialect. Obama had the looks, the message, and the organization.

The better candidate usually wins.

Now I should stress that none of the above is intended to refute the fact that the Democratic Party is the stupidest fucking party on the planet. Their only saving grace is that the Republican Party is the second stupidest. They're both stupider than even your lower mammals; a squirrel can figure out how to jump through any number of hoops to raid a bird feeder, and then repeat the process over and over and over, but for the parties, every election is new.

So you can expect the Democrats to learn just a bit from this January election to temper the damage in November, and then they'll forget it all. The Republicans will inevitably grab the reins of power again, and some Newt Gingrich guy will get drunk with power, divorce his wife for his chief of staff, and the cycle will begin anew.

And as usual, we'll be the losers.

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The Four Stages of Conservative Denial about Climate Change

This first appeared maybe five years ago in a guest post on my buddy Rob's blog Realitique, but with Copenhagen and Sarah Palin's verbal diarrhea in full swing, I thought it would be worth revisiting.

The Four Stages of Conservative Denial about Climate Change:

1. Climate change isn't happening.
2. Climate change might be happening, but humans didn't cause it.
3. Climate change is happening, and humans caused it, but it's too late to do anything about it.
4. Get your filthy hands off my water.

When this first posted, they were at Stage 1. Now they seem to be moving on to Stage 2. I'll post this again in a few years when they've moved to Stage 3. Not sure the Internet will be around after they hit Stage 4; that'll be Thunderdome time.

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Creative Bankruptcy and the Disney/Marvel Deal

From the LA Times:

The Pixar deal was a frank admission that Disney's venerable animation factory had run out of gas. Not long after Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter gave an especially revealing interview to Fortune magazine, where he told of Iger experiencing a remarkable epiphany when attending an opening-day parade at the ceremonial launch of Hong Kong Disneyland. As Lasseter recalled: "[Bob] was watching all the classic Disney characters go by, and it hit him that there was not one character that Disney had created in the past 10 years. Not one. All the new characters were invented by Pixar."

Obviously Pixar is a veritable fount of creativity right now. But Marvel?

Name one character that Marvel's invented in the past ten years that ranks with Spider-Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, or Iron Man.

Too hard? Try the last 20 years.

Okay, okay, try the last 30.

Still having trouble?


Enlighten me if I'm wrong, but the most recent Marvel character with iconic status anywhere close to the characters above is Wolverine, who first appeared in 1974--35 years ago.

(Same with DC, if not worse. You might make a case for Firestorm (1978), but he doesn't have nearly the name recognition of Wolverine.)

So while there may be a certain degree of creative vitality left in Marvel's decades-old characters, perhaps more than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Disney hasn't exactly bought something new. If new was what Disney really wanted, they may find that they and Pixar may be helping Marvel more than the other way around.

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Sorry, Mr. Murdoch, But I Ain't Buyin'

Once upon a time, if you wanted to get the word out about something in your community, you had three choices: radio, television, and the newspaper.

Because of this stranglehold on information dissemination, these media entities were able to charge outrageous amounts for advertisements. Radio and television lived off this revenue alone, and for newspapers, the number of subscribers always counted for much more than actual subscription revenue. Ad revenue underwrote the entire industry, enabling absurdities such as, in the case of television, 40 percent profit margins.

You read that right. Forty percent.

In many cases, of course, the folks who actually gathered the news never got a very big slice of that pie.

Then along came the Internet. Suddenly there were many, many places to advertise, and no one was beholden to the newspapers or radio and television stations for getting the word out. People quit buying print newspapers, and they quit watching the local news.

Poof.

Now they want to get back to those 40 percent profit margins. You know, those yachts that the CEOs of these media conglomerates own? They use a lot of gas. Country club memberships don't come cheap either.

And since no one wants to pay a premium for ads anymore, they want to try to get it from you, the consumer. Maybe they'll charge per article, maybe they'll charge for subscription. They haven't decided yet, but they're just dying to charge, because they're convinced they have content everyone has to have, and thus the money will come rolling in.

But do you think a single news article is worth .99 cents?

Are you so addicted to washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com, or nytimes.com, that you're going to pay a monthly subscription for it?

I'm not.

Many of these companies have been convinced before that people were going to pay for online content. They've always been proven wrong. Now they're going to try it again, this time in a recession.

We'll see.

I once subscribed to Salon. It was relatively new, different, they gave away print magazine subscriptions and books and the like, and I wanted them to survive. As time passed, and I started having kids, and money got tighter, I realized I could live without it. Then they switched to an ad model, and I'm back to reading, and they seem to be surviving.

A lot of journalists feel like they do hard work, and they perform a vital function in a democracy, and thus their work is worth something. I can appreciate that sentiment.

But the fact is, if I buy a song online for .99 cents, I might well listen to it over and over and over. You usually don't toss a good song. It becomes part of your collection. Maybe you'll only read a movie or book once, but still, you're talking hours of entertainment, and you might very well watch or read it again.

But a newspaper article? You read that once and you're done.

An entire newspaper? Too little content I'm actually interested in. Too much variance in quality. Sure, I might want to read a news article at The New York Times. But I want nothing to do with their fake trend pieces. I don't want the Michael Jackson coverage. I don't want The Package. The Package is old school. We're surfers. We want a piece here, a piece there. Or maybe it's not so much journalism, but news as a brand. As Clay Shirky says, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." The pay-based model is intended to preserve the old institutions, but the old institutions don't work for how we use the Internet.

You know what I'm going to do? Donate to PBS. Donate to NPR. I will frequent those sites that continue to offer free content. I will click on their ads. I may donate to them as well.

Is that hypocritical? I don't think so. I'm a fan of the donation model online. If I read a really good story or book online, I'm willing to send the writer a few bucks. For one thing, the money goes straight to the writer. You pay .99 cents for an article, and a penny of that may go to the writer, and the rest goes to pay to keep a bunch of executives in top hats and cigars. Sadly, the same is true for the .99 cents you pay for a song, but as I said, you'll want to keep a good song forever.

Traditional journalism, as defined by the news "brand" like CNN, the Los Angeles Times, or Channel 13, probably doesn't fit the donation model.

So are they going to change, or am I?

I know the answer to that one.

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A Far, Far Lesser Place

Just got back from a trip through a family road trip, with stops in Charlottesville, Knoxville, and Nashville.

While we were in Virginia we took a day trip to Washington, DC. I'd been there before, twice when I was a kid. As I told my wife, I'd like to go one day when I'm not a kid or with kids to see all the non-kid stuff. But we still had a good time.

I very much enjoyed seeing old favorites like the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, Washington Monument, plus glimpses of the White House and Capitol. I missed the FDR Memorial, but I did see the World War II Memorial, which, contrary to what I had been told by several people, I found to be quite nice, as well as moving (it helped to see it lit up at dusk).

We spent considerable time in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the National Air and Space Museum. But as cool as the Smithsonian is, I discovered a travesty about which I am compelled to write.

As much as I had looked forward to seeing the statues of Jefferson and Lincoln, the dinosaur fossils, and Apollo Lunar Module, and the Spirit of St. Louis, I had hoped to pay homage to another monument to American greatness, the model of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise used in the original Star Trek series.

We made our way through the Air & Space Museum, finding plenty to marvel at, even if my boys didn't quite understand what they were seeing and my wife and sister-in-law are insufficiently appreciative of air and space technology.

But no Enterprise.

I remembered it being prominently displayed, and I had even checked the website to make sure it was still there. But I walked from one end to another on both floors, and nothing.

I went by the visitor information desk, but there was a line of people asking about lesser exhibits, so I kept looking. Finally my son Evan could not stand for a minute longer keeping his spending money in his pocket, so we took him to the gift shop. Once free of that madness, we sat down, discussed our plans for dinner, and got ready to leave.

But I just couldn't stand it. To travel so far, and not once more gaze upon the greatest starship of all? I went back to visitor information, which fortunately was less crowded.

"You mean the Star Trek Enterprise?" the guide asked. "If you go into the museum store, and go down to the basement, you'll see it in a case in the back."

I just stared blankly, disbelieving.

We had not gone downstairs in the gift shop--I didn't even see a stairway, and certainly no indication that such a majestic item was displayed there.

Evan and I went down to have a look, and sure enough, there it was, still stately, still dignified, still glorious, even if relegated to the far corner in the basement of the gift shop. The very model in that familiar grainy video, orbiting dozens of planets of Styrofoam and spray paint.

I fought back a tear, for once again being so close to greatness, but also for the injustice.

Was it for this that Kirk fought off the effect of the spores in "This Side of Paradise," or wrested command from Stephen Collins in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Was Spock's sacrifice to restore warp power in Wrath of Khan in vain?

My God, Smithsonian, what have you done?

Evan was a tad disappointed, as he didn't really understand what he was looking at and had hoped it would be big enough for us to board. Here's a photo, bemusement evident on his face:


When we returned, I told my wife and sister-in-law of what I found, bitterness obvious in my voice.

They just rolled their eyes. "Well, maybe it ought to be over in American History," my sister-in-law said. "Since, you know, it isn't actually real or anything."

"Umm, excuse me," I said. "This is the U.S.S. Enterprise we're talking about."

Which was, and is, all that need be said.

I hate running down the Smithsonian guys, because they are the awesome preservers of some of the awesomest of awesome air and space awesomeness. But this is like, I don't know, letting the Argo rot away in a garage or something.

I hope you will join me and let the Smithsonian curators know that the U.S.S. Enterprise should be restored to a place of honor in the Air & Space Museum. If for some absurd reason this is not possible, then I would accept its movement to American History, so long as it is given the proper respect. (To make matters worse, I just noticed that they misspelled "starship" on the official website entry.)

You can let the Smithsonian know how you feel here. If need be, write your representative. Write President Obama, who once claimed to "believe in the final frontier." Write Shatner.

This injustice cannot stand.

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In Praise of the MMPB

The trade paperback (TPB) is a bastard; it has neither the endurability of a hardcover nor the utility of mass-market paperback (MMPB).

I first read nearly all of my favorite books in MMPB format: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, Absalom, Absalom!, The Cider House Rules, Billiards at Half Past Nine, War and Peace. I consider it a far superior format to TPB.

I come from the 1970s and 80s, when one could find almost any fiction, literary or genre, in MMPB. So far as I can recall, Lolita was the only book in TPB in my AP English class. Now many of those same books seem to be available only in TPB, unless they have passed into public domain and can be published in the cheapest MMPB available, and high school and college students are stuck paying twice as much.

Which is, of course, the reason for TPB's prevalence. Yes, there are some precious souls who claim they prefer TPB because the margins allow for notes. I suspect such persons hope that someday historians will pore over their library the way they pore over Mr. Lincoln's, seeking some insight into genius. I do not write in books. I have found inane every note I have happened upon in a book, and I see no reason to commit my own inanity to posterity.

There's nothing wrong with a hardcover. It's large, it lasts, it looks nice on the shelf. But I cannot afford many, and I can't lug them around.

The MMPB is democratic, egalitarian even. It was once affordable, and in comparison, still is. It can fit in one's pocket or lunch pail, and its former low cost meant it was no great tragedy if a cup of coffee were spilled over it. No matter the content, it rose no higher on the shelf than its neighbors. It did not say I AM IMPORTANT, which the TPB does in its anxious, upper-middle-class way.

A TPB doesn't cost dramatically less than a hardcover, especially if you're willing to hunt around. And yet it is bound in the same flimsy manner as the MMPB, and its paper is usually no better. It does not fit in the pocket, and one is out $17.99 plus tax if it is drowned in $4 gourmet coffee. The critic Pauline Kael famously refused to call movies "films," and I have come to suspect anyone who does. TPBs are the "films" of publishing.

And there we have the great scam the flimflammers have sold the pretentious, those who read Important things. TPB has come to suggest some distinction from the "mass market," i.e., the Great Unwashed: those who would deign to purchase their reading products at the grocery store--and for this distinction, the Important among us will happily pay a premium.

To my mind, it's a sad distinction. The grocery store book buyer sees a TPB and thinks, "that's not for me," though there's (often) as much romance and intrigue to be found between those pages, and (often) twice as well-written. And the reverse is true as well.

Thankfully, the science fiction and fantasy sections have not yet fully succumbed to the TPB contagion. Always more democratic than their "Literary" cousins, those corners of the bookstores still look much the same as they did decades ago, though the books are much fatter and it's a rare one with a cover as glorious as those Michael Whelan ones of eld. Only those rarefied few such as William Gibson and Philip K. Dick--those whom some would dare to call Important--tend to get the TPB treatment.

None of this is to suggest that TPB has no reason for being. Graphic novels, for instance, usually don't work in MMPB, and anything else art-heavy needs a larger size. But all text? Please. If memory serves, I've even seen TPBs with endnotes about the typography. That's like eating caviar from a Dixie cup.

I read War and Peace in MMPB, and I can't imagine reading it any other way. Yes, I know there are new translations, and I'm sure they're much better, but I've looked at those editions, and while handsome, I just don't see lugging around a phone book. I'll wait until they're in MMPB.

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The First Rough Draft of Moral Abnegation

Once when I was teaching college composition in Kentucky, I was working my way around the room, talking to the students about their thesis statements for their research papers, when I asked one student what her thesis was, and she replied, "Child abuse."

"Well, that might be a topic," I said, "but it's not a thesis statement. What exactly will you be arguing regarding child abuse?"

"I'm against it," she said.

I endeavored to explain that arguing against child abuse wasn't going to be much of a paper. That argument was already settled; child abuse was bad. What was debatable, however, was what exactly we should do about it.

What's driving me absolutely nuts is that we as a nation can't seem to get that far regarding torture. Whenever I turn to one of the loathsome 24-hour news channels, journalists--excuse me, "television news personalities"--are now constantly telling me that "there's an intense debate about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques."

How and why is there a debate? Have we all gone mad? There should be no debate: torture is bad. It's wrong. It's terrible. We shouldn't do it. The end.

Yet the media just laps up whatever is served to them by the right-wing freak machine. "Journalists" have become so morally vacant, so invertebrate, that if they were in Nazi Germany, they'd be reporting that there was an intense debate between Jews and the Nazis who wanted to feed them into ovens. They would have roundtable discussions about whether it was "really right to call it genocide," because otherwise the Nazis would say that they're biased in their reporting.

They still actually give that black-hearted lunatic Cheney respect that he long ago lost any right to. He and his cabal have been caught lying innumerable times, and yet to actually call a lie a lie is somehow evidence of "bias." They fail to challenge absurd statements from the freak machine about how Obama wants terrorists to be walking our neighborhood streets. Let me tell you who shouldn't be walking our neighborhood streets: Dick Cheney. I won't feel safe until they lock up that sick fuck next door to Khalid Sheik Mohammed. They deserve each other.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" is newspeak at its finest. You would think people who ostensibly have been trained to use precise language would find such a term not only abhorrent but laughable. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is something Blofeld says to Bond as his goons are lowering a giant circular saw onto him: "We have certain . . . enhanced interrogation techniques, Mr. Bond--BWA HA HA HA HA HA!" And yet turn on the news, and some blow-dried dipshit with a degree in "journalism" will sure enough be using it. It takes former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura to call it what it is: torture. Unlike Cheney, Ventura served in the military. He was a Navy Seal. He was waterboarded. He knows what he's talking about.

Here's an idea, "journalists": start investigating whether Cheney and his fellow depraved cohorts were using torture to build the case for the war in Iraq. The evidence is starting to build. And that would be the greatest abuse of power in this country's history. But what's that? There was a new American Idol crowned? Someone just posted new topless photos of Carrie Prejean?

Oh, well, never mind then.

But my rants should not in any way be taken as an attempt to excuse or turn a blind eye toward the actions of our current president. Despite his earlier rhetoric, he now seems content to sweep the matter of torture under the rug for the sake of political expediency. That disgusts me. I can never look at him the same way again. I know, I know, I shouldn't be surprised. Call me crazy, but I actually thought that any sane, semi-intelligent, semi-educated person would recognize a policy of torture for it was: a malignant cancer on our institutions.

There's a line in Heinrich Böll's Billiards At Half Past Nine that I've remembered ever since I first read it in high school. Forgive me if I don't quote it exactly, but it goes like this: "Whenever I meet someone, I ask myself whether I would like to be turned over to them. I usually don't like the answer."

Whenever I encounter someone defending our government's use of torture or attempting to excuse it, I ask myself whether I would like to be turned over to them.

I don't like the answer.

Such persons have renounced their humanity.

Watch out for them.

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Dear President Obama

My previous letters were full of friendly sarcasm.

But I can't muster any jocosity when you continue to capitulate regarding the previous administration's use of torture.

The notion that the United States would make torture a policy makes me want to throw up.

The argument that it was effective is an exceedingly poor one. Public hand amputations might reduce crime, but that wouldn't make it right.

I recognize that sweeping this entire matter under the rug is the politically expedient course of action. But if you stand for anything at all, you cannot sweep torture under the rug.

You said you were against torture. You said you were for transparency. You said you were for accountability.

Let's see actions to match those words.

Sincerely,
Lein Shory

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